He was as tall as Wexford, younger than Mildred by perhaps five or six years. He had a fine head of greying fair hair and a ruddy face with eyes of that attractive greenish-blue that is almost turquoise. This was the man whose shirt Vladlena had burned, but today he was wearing along with his black jeans a sweatshirt of such a dark brown that no burn mark would have showed. The interior of his house was as unlike his former wife’s as was possible, its decoration minimalist, the colours predominantly white, black and beige, the only ornament in this living room a large black and red jar full of dried grasses and beech leaves.
‘Can I offer you anything? I suppose it’s too early for a drink.’
‘Too early for me, thanks, Mr Jones.’
‘And I’d better not. If my wife catches me at the Scotch before midday I shall get a lecture. She worries about my health, poor love. What did you want to talk to me about?’
‘I believe you recommended a company called Subearth to Mr Rokeby when he was thinking of having an underground room built.’
‘No, it was an oufit called Underland. And he had already been on to them and made an appointment. We got chatting over the garden wall – literally over the garden wall – and when he mentioned Underland I said I’d used them and they were OK. They went bust soon after.’ Colin Jones laughed. ‘I wasn’t to know that, though. The chap who came had an architect with him, but I don’t know anything about them. Sorry I can’t be of more help. You know, I think I will have that Scotch. Just a small one.’
He left the room and Wexford could hear him talking to someone and just catch the tone of a woman’s soft voice. The glass in his hand with, as he had said, a very small quantity of neat whisky in it, Jones came back, preceded by a slender young woman with long fair hair, wearing jeans and a pale grey sweater against which hung a silver cross on a chain. She too was carrying a drink, but hers looked like water.
‘Let me get you something,’ she said to Wexford. ‘You don’t have to have the – what do they call it? – the hard stuff. Have some sparkling water like me, why not?’
Jones laughed. ‘Let me introduce my wife Vladlena.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS ON the tip of his tongue to respond by telling her they had been searching for her high and low, but he restrained himself, and said instead, ‘How do you do, Mrs Jones?’
‘Please, call me Lena.’
It was Colin Jones who began to explain. ‘I expect you know Lena used to work for my first wife, then luckily for her for a very nice guy called Goldberg. Do you know him?’
‘I’ve met him and he is very nice.’ Wexford turned to look at Vladlena. ‘And another friend of yours, Ms Sophie Baird.’
She put a glass of sparkling water with ice and a slice of lemon on the table beside him. ‘Some people have been very kind to me.’
‘But not old Mildred, eh?’ Colin Jones gave a hearty laugh and as he did Vladlena’s face lit up, so that she was suddenly beautiful. ‘The old bitch. I don’t know how I stuck her so long. Well, I was telling you. Mildred really scared Lena and she ran away yet again. She’d saved up quite a bit of her wages from David and she got herself a room in a grotty little street round the back of Lisson Grove.’
‘It was a nice little room, Colin,’ Lena protested.
‘If you say so.’ Colin Jones’s smile seemed to signify that whatever his wife said would be fine with him. ‘Anyway, Lena was walking along the Marylebone Road and I was coming from Baker Street Station. We met, we recognised each other and – well, the rest is history.’
‘He buy me a cup of coffee and we talk and …’
‘And from that moment we’ve not really been apart, have we, Lena? We got married a month later.’
Their eyes met and the naked love in each face, enraptured with the other, aroused in Wexford a sudden shaft of envy. It died as soon as it began. After all, he had known that and often knew it still. Whatever people say – however they knock it and rush to say it can’t last – there is nothing so good as being in love. Perhaps it was partly this which made him very careful what he said and asked. He would do nothing to spoil it. He was, after all, no longer a policeman. And this, which he sometimes cursed, could be an enormous advantage, for because of it he was not obliged, as he would once have been, to communicate what he knew to the UK Border Agency.
But still, the less he knew about the circumstances of these two the better. In some ways it wasn’t his business. Could they help him in finding the identity of the young woman in the vault? That was his only concern.
‘I don’t want to enquire too much into your circumstances,’ he said carefully. ‘I am no longer a policeman. I’m nothing. An ordinary pensioner, if you like.’
Colin Jones interrupted him. ‘Look, I really do need a real drink.’ He looked at Vladlena. ‘May I have a drink, darling?’
‘Of course.’ It surprised Wexford that she agreed so readily.
‘And I’m fetching one for our guest, no matter what he says.’
The moment he had gone she was writing something on a card she took from her jeans pocket. It was quickly handed to Wexford and he read it seconds before her husband came back. Meet me in Sainsbury’s 12.45.
Wexford was unused to whisky these days, but he obediently took a small swig, taken aback a little by the way it went straight to his head. He held Vladlena’s card clutched in his trouser pocket. They talked of innocuous things, the cold weather, unseasonable for early autumn, the pleasantness of being so near Clapham Common, the excellent local shopping, at mention of which Vladlena caught Wexford’s eye. And then they talked of something important, the child she expected to be born in April.
It was ten minutes to midday when he left. Walking in the Balham direction, he enquired for Sainsbury’s and was told it was no more than a hundred yards away. Why had she arranged to meet him without her husband’s knowledge? Not because she intends to deceive him in any serious way, he thought. He couldn’t be wrong about those two. Most likely she wanted not to involve Colin in any further trouble that might result from her revelations.
He went into a café and asked for a black coffee. The whisky was zinging around not at all unpleasantly in his head. That must be quietened. He tried to remember the residential requirements for naturalisation. You had to be a resident of the United Kingdom for three years, to have been present three years before your application, have not spent more than something over two hundred days out of the UK – he couldn’t recall how many more – and here came the crunch, have not been in breach of the immigration rules at any stage during the three-year period. You might say Vladlena had been in breach of those rules every day during that period. Well, that was that then. But they wouldn’t be found out through him. He wasn’t a policeman, he thought, and almost laughed out loud. Would the baby make any difference? He seemed to remember that a child’s mother’s nationality established its nationality, but perhaps not if she was married to a British citizen? Whatever happened, the marriage couldn’t be undone. He paid for his coffee, left and set off for Sainsbury’s.
It was a very large store, but he spotted her from quite a way off, drifting slowly with an empty trolley along an aisle between cereals and breads. She had on a black leather jacket and he wondered if that was the one Mildred had seen her wearing when she identified her in Oxford Street. She smiled at him and slightly raised one hand.
‘I’m deceiving my husband,’ Vladlena began, ‘but not to hurt him. It’s to save him knowing what I meant to do. I never did do it, but I meant to.’